This Now Extends to My Daughter, Lydia Unsworth
Blue Diode Press, 2026
One of a pair of full-length titles that Manchester poet Lydia Unsworth has out this year—alongside Stay Awhile (Merseyside UK: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2026)—is This Now Extends to My Duaghter (Edinburgh Scotland: Blue Diode Press, 2026), a collection of deeply evocative and descriptive lyrics, offering patterns, passages and narrative quirks alongside parental wisdoms, odd observations and critical explorations into, as Rachel Curzon’s back cover blurb offers, “legacies of systems, institutions and other people.” “the hall is full of letters / telling me what I owe” begins the poem “Communications (politics),” “and offering me £10 for my time / i.e. DNA, if I’m willing / to be involved in some largest ever / exciting programme of national health research // people are falling down the stairs / drinking themselves to death / in flats we cycle past, aided and / abetted by abusive partners / who accompany them to appointments / yet whose names evade capture / on official documents [.]”
Across enormously clever, wry and critically-savage poems, Unsworth examines living in a rental market, work and parenting through a language rich and gymnastic, thick with a play of sound and rhythm. “they are church organs / pockets of exhalation / bored effluvia / wobbly bolus / thermal little party pipes,” writes the short piece “Clam,” “floating in the dim coagulant / I open and close my mouth like a bored valve [.]” There’s almost an element that echoes the days of 1970s and 80s and 90s Vancouver poetry, specifically poets around The Kootenay School of Writing (Peter Culley, Kevin Davies, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Michael Turner, Clint Burnham, Michael Barnholden, et al), through her exploration across language through labour and elements of the working class (very different than, say, the Vancouver “work poets” of the same era: Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, et al). Through Unsworth, situated in Manchester, historically known as an industrial, working class town (also known as having one of the most vibrant and influential musical scenes in the world), the poems are situated in a lived reality, whether worrying about landlords or shopping, job interviews or general labour security, while simultaneously critiqueing and questioning, and attempting to establish one’s own agency, one’s own clarity. In many ways, Unsworth displays herself, even through her playful explorations, as a grounded, moral writer, with a narrative lyric that offers the distinctions of right and wrong. There are ways to do and approach things, certainly, and she will suffer no fools or foibles in finding her way. Listen to the opening, for example, of the poem “Shining Example,” that begins:
if you give me a job, I will
execute it
I can dehusk 100,000 seeds while the earth stays
still
I can direct express freight through a
quarry
excavate nothing
if you don’t excite
yourself
you aren’t going to
convince anyone
external to exalt you
be exhilarating
make the recruiter want
to examine you
I beg to differ
to be allowed to differ
rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he accidentally co-owns a house across the street from where his parents were married, and spent more than twenty years running a reading series two blocks from where he was born. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), recently won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award.
